#9. What is a healthy weight for me? Monday, August 24, 2020 In life, we go on a lot of journeys. Some are geographical, some professional, some spiritual. And perhaps some are drug-addled (okay, let's call those ones "trips"). Trips aside, most journeys are remarkably similar. Those of self-improvement (health, for instance) share many of the same qualities as journeys of the other varieties, such as vacations. And since we all love a good vacation, let's start our discussion there. When you begin planning any major expedition, the "big ticket item" is the actual ticket. Airplanes don't wander through the air aimlessly until they eventually land someplace random. Pilots are professionals. They have specific destinations in mind and they almost always get there. What does this mean for you and your health? Well, if you want your bodily journey to deposit you somewhere satisfying, you have to approach it with the professionalism of a pilot. I introduced this concept a couple of weeks ago while talking about goal setting, and I quote myself: "before we can plot a course, we need precise coordinates." What are the simplest coordinates one can plot? Bodyweight. That's why practically every New Year's resolution incorporates a bathroom scale. As we discussed in the second tip of our "mirror, mirror" blog, the scale is not a tell-all exposé of health, fitness, and physical prowess. Heaviness does not expel healthiness from our figures, and plenty of dainty folks have dreadful body compositions. The scale has its limitations, but it remains the simplest, most objective resource we have. So it's reasonable to use it... no matter what your goal is. Sometimes it's weight gain we're after. Other times it's maintenance. But most often, the goal is weight loss. How much loss? What's an appropriate amount of bodily expunging? That depends. Most people -- not everyone but a great majority -- experienced relatively steady weight gain from the time they were zero years old until they were 17 or 18, maybe 20. And then they arrived at the initial plateau of adulthood. For the next span of years, they maintained a relatively stable weight. Because nothing lasts forever (e.g., cold November rain and anything visible in Second Corinthians), our bodyweights eventually depart that plateau. After a long-ish period of corporeal consistency, those corpuses begin a second ascent. This one is more gradual. Month after month, little by little, the scale's number creeps upward. It's very slight, undetectable on a daily or even weekly basis. But by the end of the year it's noticeable. At the end of two years, it's more noticeable. And at the end of three years, other people have begun to notice one of two things: either a newly-snug old wardrobe or a suspiciously-baggy new wardrobe. Since we have a history of naming our examples, let's call today's protagonist Victor Clowngut. What advice might we offer Constable Clowngut (Victor is a low-ranking Canadian police officer who enjoys long walks on the beach and slam poetry competitions, according to the online dating profile I've just invented in my imagination)? What advice can we offer that will help him in matters of both flesh and fashion? For example, how quickly can he expect to make progress? And what bodyweight should he aim for? To answer those questions, we turn to this week's tips. Tip 1) Speed of progress. Assuming one's goal involves weight loss, don't lose more than a pound a week. Fat takes time to burn. Metabolism is not a forest fire, raging through the woodlands of adiposity. It's more like a Bunsen burner, steadily melting away the grams of our girth. So don't expect acres of midriff to be whisked away after every encounter with the treadmill. A pound a week is reasonable if you have a lot of week-pounds ahead of you. Cut that in half if you're getting closer to the finish line. Tip 2) Speed of progress in the other direction. If you're trying to gain weight, don't amass more than half a pound each week. The protein you eat doesn't just insert itself straight into your tissues. It has to be "translated" (i.e., genes have to instruct cells how to link amino acids into properly-sequenced chains). This takes time. And you can't force it by eating another hotdog. Cells are not that obedient. As such, you won't find your meat bank up three pounds of muscle in a week. If the scale reports three new pounds, your body composition has probably taken a turn for the jiggly. Tip 3) Final destination. In general, the healthiest bodyweight for a person of the Clowngut demographic (i.e., most people) is the one they preserved for a while when puberty had finished dispensing its final aftershocks. The weight we held upon surmounting adulthood's plateau, but before starting our second ascent, is a cozy one. When the body decides it has finished growing, having found its ideal home, it settles down. Its metabolism and heart function and kidney duties (and so on) all become accustomed to their residence. Let's say your physiology spent a decade making that house a home. That's a strong relationship. If it were a marital one, and it was your spouse who was so inseparable -- accompanying you all day, every time you're on the toilet, every minute you eat, every moment of sleep -- divorce would be difficult to cope with. Struggles would be understandable. Likewise, divorcing our bodies of their homes, and forcing them into new, unfamiliar residences seldom ends in health and happiness. So let's reinterpret Dorothy's classic line: There's no place like home. And let's resolve to click our heels against that treadmill, stride after stride, until we've returned to where we belong.